This invention relates to a knowledge processing technique, and more particularly, to a method and an apparatus for processing knowledge suitable in use for scheduling planning problems in the manufacturing industry as a main subject, and the engineering field including the distribution industry, and a business field.
A conventional knowledge processing method divides the knowledge into a procedural type knowledge and a declarative type knowledge, as described in "Classifying the Knowledge into Two Types" in Feb. 27, 1989 issue of Nikkei Computer, on Pages 83 to 84.
On the other hand, a conventional expert system, as shown in FIG. 9, permits, as far as a knowledge representation is concerned, rule files in a knowledge base 910 to be divided into a plurality of files such as rule files 920, . . . , 930, and described in the knowledge base 910. An inference engine 900 organizes a single integral network 950 for verifying the knowledge from these divided rule files and manages a root 940 for the network 950. When a frame in a frame file 960 is modified by executing a rule, the inference engine 900 verifies the modified frame with the network. In this event, since there is a single network, the modified frame needs to be verified with a network portion other than that to which the executed rule belongs. See, Ishida "Production System and Parallel Processing" the Journal of Information Processing Society of Japan, Vol. 26, No. 3, pp. 213-216 (1985).
The above-mentioned prior art proposes to divide an expert knowledge for lay-out design into two kinds of knowledge, that is, a procedural type knowledge and a declarative type knowledge, however, it does not refer to procedures for utilizing these two kinds of knowledge nor a classifying method for other knowledge, nor a processing system for these knowledge.
With respect to conventional expert system building tools, a rule can be divided into a plurality of rule files and described, as far as the knowledge representation is concerned, to facilitate description and arrangement of knowledge. In diagnosis and consulating fields which have conventionally utilized such a tool, the knowledge does not comprise a large number of data to be retrieved, or the knowledge has a top-down type structure. There have been developed processing systems for tools which can effectively process the knowledge having such contents.
However, assuming that the above-mentioned prior art is applied to a scheduling problem, the processing system contained in the prior art tools does not process the respective divided and described rules independently of one another, so that, if a data is not clearly classified and can be processed by either the procedural type knowledge or the declarative type knowledge, such data is processed twice by different types of knowledge and accordingly the processing cannot be speeded up.